DOKTOR TRIVAGO

Hey, fellow Russians! My advice to any of you who wish to travel abroad is always simple! Consult Doktor Trivago before you go! You don’t want to pay more than you have to for a room do you? After all, your Roubles are worth absolutely nothing! So why waste all those dollars you have gathered by selling secrets to the West or your children to Syria paying $100 for a room in, for example, Salisbury, England, when you can get a bunk-bed room in a stinking part of East London for next to nothing?

Doktor Trivago has thousands of rooms on his website, and can advise you on a) How to get a false passport, b) How to avoid contamination by nerve gas and c) What type of prostitute you can bring with you on your next trip so as to avoid being called “gay” by nasty Western Europeans who do not understand why two gentlemen tourists like looking at cathedral spires.

Doktor Trivago has answers to all of your questions about your travel plans, and even about your plans when you return home and discover that Mr “Ras” Putin, the head of state, has poisoned your dogs, demoted you from your position as a Colonel of the GRU and is keeping you in chains in the basement of his presidential palace in Red Square! Even there you will discover that there are different options of rooms at different prices, depending on how many fingernails you are prepared to have pulled out!

FUN WITH LETTERS

POPULAR AMERICAN COMEDIAN BORIS JOHNSON is once again in the news, and although I had more or less decided to abandon writing on this blog there are events which have a mysterious ability to attract me to the keyboard as long as I have time.

THE LAST TIME SUCH an event took place was when equally popular American television entertainer Donald Trump cleared dandruff from bemused French president Macron's shoulder, but this time it is the kerfuffle surrounding what Boris Johnson wrote in the British newspaper The Telegraph. Even this morning, the 19th of August, people are still arguing in television debates over whether Johnson should be punished for something he wrote two weeks ago.

JOHNSON IS FAR TOO FLY to "state" rather than infer his views, and an intelligent readership should judge on what is in fact written, something which none of the commentators I have read or heard have done; as if, in fact, they have not read the column.

JOHNSON criticises Denmark for joining France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Chechnya, Belgium, Chad, Cameroon, Congo and Niger in banning burkas and niqabs. He quite correctly states that, in his opinion, women should not be told what to wear.

HERE IS WHERE I THINK many of the flea-brained leftie politicians have misunderstood the intelligence of Johnson's writing: I would perhaps be prepared to suggest that a good many young women -- one of them was interviewed yesterday on the BBC -- do not wish to wear the burka, but are forced to do so by their fathers and are often punished cruelly for not obeying the male members of the family. That is, of course, that many women who wear the burka have been told what to wear and what not to wear -- due to the obscure and unfounded religious beliefs of the men in their families.

Mr Johnson´s "joke" about letter boxes is obviously tongue-in-cheek. And he does not say that Muslim women look like letter boxes, merely that it is ridiculous for someone to "choose to look like a letter box" and that if a female student turned up for a lecture looking like a bank robber this would cause alarm. As a lecturer I must agree with him.

(My photographs show a letter box -- not a post box -- a bank robber and Boris Johnson with Donald Trump, in order to aid clarity on the issue.)

MAKING A STAND

DESPITE OUR TECHNOLOGY TODAY, it occasionally occurs to me that we have progressed very little since our more primitive days as Neanderthals. We are still both delighted and plagued by sensory memories of the days back when men and women lived in caves in fear of starvation, freezing to death and slaughter by animals. We take great pleasure in the sound of rapid running water in a nearby stream; we bizarrely feel comfort in the flames and sounds of a cracking good open fire; we take delight whenever we feel able to eat outdoors in a warm shade while the sun beats down; and some men still get a hard on and can behave aggressively whenever they see a fruity female flashing the flesh.

THUS WE STILL TODAY witness disgusting cases of harassment of women by men in high places of power and influence, as shown since the Harvey Weinstein case by dozens of accusations against top people in film, theatre, television and politics, particularly in the USA and the UK, where the media feel they have the freedom to report on these issues without fear of being clapped in irons.

IT IS THUS GOOD NEWS to see the beginning of the "Times Up" campaign, which has been set up by a group of prominent American and British actresses in order to raise awareness about how women are exploited and often harassed by producers, executives, directors, casting directors and indeed other actors.

FOR FAR TOO LONG NOW those involved in the media have seen serious actress as nothing more than flesh and -- no doubt puzzled at why some men think that women are "available" in exchange for a part in a movie or a promotion -- these brave actresses have come forward to make a stand.

FOR MY PART, I SAY hat's off to Eva Longoria,

 Emma Stone,

Natalie Portman,

Kerry Washington,

and Rashida Jones

for launching this brave initiative that will no doubt be another step on the way to seeing female actresses achieve the same respect as their male counterparts.

BUT SERIOUSLY, HAVING WORKED AS A DIRECTOR, casting director and occasional producer of both plays and films in the late eighties and early nineties, and in various capacities in the cinema since then, I propose a further move that will help to clear up this mess. Someone should form a similar association or launch a similar campaign through which honest men could denounce and expose actresses (or women in any other capacity for that matter) who offer sex or sexual acts to men in exchange for a part. I know from personal experience that this happens. Shouldn't these women be exposed?

My photographs are taken from various magazine shoots or publicity handouts that these actresses were no doubt forced to undertake.

I WANNA MARRY HARRY

THE END OF ANY YEAR is always a good time for us to look back at previous events and consider what effect the past may have on our future. In the past -- and today in some -- it is considered that only by "exorcising our demons" from the past may we push forward and become better human beings from now on.

I OF COURSE SUBSCRIBE to this view of life, and I am pleased to see that young Prince Harry Windsor has now decided to put his own past chasing women behind him and settle down with a wholesome lady who has the ability to make him happy, to complete him as a man and to act as a friend to Duchess Catherine when her workload becomes heavier than it is now.

THAT, I BELIEVE, IS THE GENERAL position taken by the English press, and nowhere have I read of snide remarks likening their engagement to the vulgar American television game show in which aspiring young actresses fought each other in what the children today call a "structured reality vote-off" in order to become engaged to a young man they believed to be British royalty. Some evil people would say that the producers of the show, involving these women having sex with the pretender "to see who he liked best" are now sitting on a goldmine, even though the show was considered controversial and "far-fetched" at the time.

YET MY CHRISTIAN CHARITY towards others means that I believe it impossible that anyone would do such underhand things for financial gain. I am convinced that these producers will never allow the show to be seen again, and will instruct the owners of something called the "Youtube" to "take it down" as my youngest terms it.

AT THE TIME OF THE SHOW, the Royal Family, as usual, made no comment.

My pictures show the winning contestant (top picture) and Harry with Meghan (bottom picture, second from left) with her future ladies-in-waiting.

ANOTHER KETTLE OF FISH

FANS OF THE GREAT LAUREL AND HARDY will remember the famous line spoken by Oliver Hardy after the unfortunate end to another particularly distressing comic episode during which the duo would have managed to mess up whatever task they had set themselves at the beginning of their marvellous, short knockabout routines.

"ANOTHER FINE KETTLE OF FISH you have pickled me in," Hardy would say, while Stan Laurel would look distraught and scratch at his dishevelled hair.

WHILE THERE HAVE BEEN many comedy duos over the years who have tried to emulate these two masters, it has been apparent that when they retired they seem to have broken the mould; hardly anyone, as humorous as many may be, has come close to achieving their dizzy heights of comedy.

UNTIL YESTERDAY THAT IS, when Boris Johnson met Sergei Lavrov for talks about the relationship between Russia and the United Kingdom at a "high level" encounter intended to "clear the air" and have a one-on-one talk about the issues that are bothering the British government.

SOME PEOPLE MAY BE OF THE OPINION that it is not a good idea to entrust such a mission to Mr Johnson, particularly given the fact that he gives HRH the Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh a run for his offshore assets in terms of insulting foreigners, but I was confident that he would come up with the goods.

THE COMEDY BEGAN WHEN Johnson stated with delight that economic relations between the two countries were excellent after news that Russia had increased its purchases of Kettle Crisps and had bought 300 Bentleys, although he did leave it open as to whether they were all intended for Russian government officials.

LAVROV WAS NOT TO BE LEFT behind in the comic stakes: when asked whether the Russian government was involved in espionage activity against the United Kingdom, he stated that they had only spent "a few Kopecks" on Internet interference activity -- which is good to know.

THE FINAL GAG BY THE DUO was when gathered journalists asked Mr Johnson whether he trusted Mr Lavrov. "I did hand him my coat when I came in," he stated. To which Lavrov replied, bringing the house down, "Yes, but there was nothing in the pockets!"

LIKE SLAPSTICK OR NOT, it is diplomacy of this character that in the end will manage to create good relations between countries which could so easily be at war; and the sombre, humbug-loving antiquated grey-suited politicians of the past may well scoff at a generation of Putins, Lavrovs, Berlusconis, Johnsons and Trumps, but we all know that whatever will happen will happen, and we might as well have a little fun while we watch it happening.

My top photo shows the two great diplomats in action, with the famous comedy duo on stage in the middle snap.

PRETTY VACANT

WHEN I DECIDED SOME TIME AGO that I would stop writing this chronicle it was mainly due to the fact that I considered that international politics were in good hands. With Donald Trump as the president of the USA and Boris Johnson on the cusp of taking over the United Kingdom, political commentary would be at best redundant.

THE ROLE OF THE POLITICAL analyst is that of pointing out what is wrong in the activities of our leaders, and as I increasingly saw that Trump, Johnson and even the schoolmarmish Theresa May were doing what they were supposed to be doing it seemed to be churlish to comment on detail and foolish to approve.

EVEN WHEN TRUMP went to France to meet Macron and, on returning, stated "They showed us a deal. We'll have a look at it and if we like it we'll do it. If not we'll get back in touch" I thought that I would refrain from commenting on this perfect piece of proper common sense politics. Trump's liberal, horn-rimmed glasses critics will never understand what this language means to people who are scraping out a living in a difficult America, and so I have to put up with their smarmy, smug, sneaky and snide comments against someone who will probably go down in history as at least a game-changer.

SO WHEN DONALD TRUMP STATED yesterday that the USA gives "millions, and sometimes billions" of taxpayers' dollars to countries around the world and then they vote against the USA at the UN Assembly I thought he had come to some kind of laudable pinnacle. "We'll be watching those votes," he said. "Vote against us, and we'll save money. We don't care."

IT IS THIS "WE DON'T CARE" that ought to send shivers down the spines of the corrupt, heartless, evil despots and nabobs who run the third world. But it doesn't, of course, because they don't care about their own people either.

My photo shows Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, at the time of singing "Pretty Vacant", heavily criticised by the establishment for lyrics stating "We don't care".

WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS

(Cast of Casablanca: l-r, a waiter, Ilsa Lund, Rick, Victor Laszlo, Captain Louis Renault)

TRUMP BASHERS ARE ONCE AGAIN merrily finding ways to point the finger at the President of the USA for being true to his word. The decision to refuse to advance any further for the moment into the rather curious Paris Accord on Global Warming is seen by some as the equivalent to him personally blowing up the planet and forcing future generations to live in a world where the average temperature will increase by nearly 2º Centigrade every hundred years.

NOT WISHING IMMEDIATELY to put forward any view of my own on why this might not actually be a bad idea, given the savings on the use of heating devices in the colder northern hemisphere it will imply, I would nonetheless wish to point out that there still remains no hard evidence whatsoever that these measures will do any more than modify whatever changes are taking place in the world's climate, a factor that has been a constant over time.

WE HAVE REPEATEDLY BEEN TOLD that 195 countries have signed and/or ratified the agreement, but a look at the numbers will tell a slightly different tale. About 180 of these countries do not exactly produce even a fifth of 1 percent of the overall emissions, and were perfectly happy to sign up to an agreement that basically limits car ownership to one per household and calls for restrictions on 24-hour use of air conditioning in offices. Four things which a large percentage of them do not possess anyway.

OF COURSE, DELEGATIONS FROM ALL of these countries have been flying back and forth between United Nations' meetings in New York, Durban, Kyoto, Copenhagen and Paris (and next year Marrakesh) in order to discuss these grave issues, probably making a larger carbon footprint than their entire populations would normally do in a lifetime.

OF THE 'BIG FOUR' POLLUTERS, the USA, China, Russia and India, three of them have solemnly sworn to keep to the agreement's terms and even go further, thus doing their bit to help produce a better world for everyone in the future, and thus having rich praise heaped upon them by some young ladies from one of the "green" parties on television yesterday evening. I do hope, however, that whatever "better world" India, Russia and China might manage to cobble together as the standard for the future of planet earth involves not only the clean air they are promising, but the ability for all to breathe it.

AS FOR THE MOMENT AT LEAST, in the America that these green ladies hate it is still possible to protest on the streets, still possible to be a Christian without being put in prison and tortured, possible to paint and write without censorship, possible for widows to mourn their husbands without fear of being burnt alive, for women to walk in the streets without fear of gang rape simply because no man is with them and possible to live a childhood without later finding out your father sold you to your uncle as a bride or to a businessman as a slave.

SOME MAY EVEN REACT WITH DOUBTS about whether Russia, China and India are actually telling us the truth about how they are reducing their emissions, particularly as even in the so-called "second division" of polluters, headed by Germany, with its strict laws on motor vehicle emissions, it has come to light that the good people at Volkswagen actually lied about the testing of their cars, making the whole statistical analysis issue little more than a joke.

WHAT THE POLITICAL WORLD and its media friends really do not like about Donald Trump's position is that it is real and honest. There is actually no point in doing any of this if it just serves to send politicians around the world for freebies for a few nights in expensive hotels, signing agreements that mean nothing to most of the people who sign them, and having people promise things that they not only are incapable of doing but have no intention of doing anyway. 

BUSINESSMEN LIKE TRUMP MUST SEE this as a massive waste of time. And, as they sometimes say, time is money. Like the $10 billion of United Nations money raised for the "Green Climate Fund". The final destination of which has yet to be defined.

PUSHING THE ENVELOPE

THE OSCARS ACADEMY AWARDS CEREMONY, despite being considered as a game show by many, has always seemed to be a very self-consciously correct performance, running like clockwork and always on cue, with its protagonists keeping to their lines even when drunk, drugged, bored, angry or any mix of these things. Thus, albeit, remarkably, never in its eighty-nine years of history has there been what my friends in the more popular newspapers are calling a "cock-up". Until this year, that is.

I WAS THEREFORE SOMEWHAT SURPRISED to see the two auditors from Price Waterhouse Cooper giving an interview to the Huffington Post on the 24th of February, discussing this very issue. Brian Cullinan and Martha Ruiz, the auditors in question, were asked what would happen if the wrong winner were announced, and replied: "the exact procedure is unknown because no mistake of that kind has been made in the Oscars’ 88-year history." But added, “We would make sure that the correct person was known very quickly,” Cullinan said. “Whether that entails stopping the show, us walking onstage, us signalling to the stage manager — that’s really a game-time decision, if something like that were to happen. Again, it’s so unlikely.”

NO INTERVIEW OF THIS KIND HAS EVER BEEN given to, nor sought by the press in the 83 years of Price Waterhouse auditing the Oscar votes. So the rumours doing the rounds, to use the language that the children adopt nowadays, were that "something major" was about to "go down" at the event. As any film buff knows, there can be no foreshadowing without payoff.

A GLANCE AT THE NOMINEES -- therefore those invited to sit in special seats so as to be seen in extreme close up when needed -- showed that the Academy was doing everything to make up for disappointing people last year when it was deemed that "not enough" people of minorities were selected for awards. Some might have thought that the "something big" would be an astonishing clean sweep of awards for black actors, directors and producers -- an event in itself. And all of this was despite the fact that the runaway favourite had been so heavily hyped into pole position that only a fool would bet against it.

AND THUS, AFTER THE FRACAS at the end of this year's ceremony, there may be people so cynical as to believe that the considerably large percentage of older, white men among the members of the Academy who voted for the Oscar awards this year might have felt somewhat miffed and sulky about having been bullied into having to give a prize to a movie by and about black or gay people instead of the movie that they thought was the best picture.

THESE CYNICAL PEOPLE -- whoever they may be -- might also consider that by engineering a situation in which La La Land was announced as Best Picture, and by allowing the mistake to go uncorrected for long enough for the entire production team and many of the actors to get onto the stage, and by letting the executives make their speeches of gratitude before everything was sorted out these Academy members were making their real feelings felt before reluctantly allowing the PC in America to get the better of the PwC in the la la land that is Hollywood.

FAKE OR FALSE

MUCH IN VOGUE NOWADAYS is "fake news", suggesting that the newly-household expression may make it onto the Collins Online Dictionary list of the most overused terms of 2017, and inspiring me to have a brief look at what this linguistic item really means.

AS ANY SENSIBLE LINGUISTIC PHILOSOPHER knows, two words or expressions must have different meanings in at least one situation to justify the fact that they exist separately, as demonstrated by the example given by the great Wilfred Hodges in his book Logic, in order to explain the difference between saying (after one person has shot another person's cow) "I'm afraid I shot your cow by accident", rather than "I shot your cow by mistake".

SUCH SUBTLE DIFFERENCES ARE KNOWN to anyone who went to school in the days before the subjects of Latin and Greek were abandoned in favour of lessons about how to look after a Tamagotchi, which themselves are part of the ancient history syllabus for many of the children at school nowadays, preferring lessons in YouTube and killing people in "online real-life-like situations" on their phones.

THUS 'FAKE NEWS' MUST be different to 'false news', particularly as even in the United States of America politicians cannot get away with calling people liars. I detect a clue in the rather bizarre new "panel show" The Fake News Show, which recently started on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom. This comedy treat started out by having the members of the panel "tweet" false news (aka "lies") about themselves, and then wait to see how long it would be before a reputable newspaper or other communications medium took the bait and published it as "real" news, a process through which it would become "fake news". 

CONFUSED? DO NOT BE. Newspapers have been publishing lies ever since newspapers have existed, and there are various good reasons and acceptable situations in which one may tolerate this: while Prince Harry was serving in Afghanistan newspapers were asked by Buckingham Palace to keep this fact secret and to occasionally slip in little "white lies" about his whereabouts in order for the curious not to twig the truth due to Harry's absence from official royal duties such as playing pool naked.

THUS DONALD J TRUMP HAS EVERY REASON to haul the media over the coals in the way he does without having his own feet held to the fire. We appear to have come -- finally -- to an age where someone in power is deciding to state what a great many people have known for a long time: politicians and written press journalists cannot be trusted.

INDEED MANY POLLS PLACE their credibility lower than real estate agents or used car salesmen. And it is in some way fitting that the owner of a real estate emporium should be the current leader of the free world, having criticised his opponents, all of whom are "career politicians", threatening his main rival with the hoosegow, and now turning his attention to the media.

TRUMP'S RECEPTION AND PERFORMANCE in Florida last night shows that he has great support among the very people who do not trust these politicians and who probably spend little time or attention on the mainstream media. President Trump again comes over as a communicator and his wife as a charmer. However, the same issue pops up when I see Trump as when I hear or read what he says, leaving me in a quandary: Is that fake tan? Or false tan?

ПРЕЗИДЕНТСКИЙ KOMПPOMAT

QUITE CORRECTLY, THE RUSSIAN EMBASSY in London has recently pointed out that intelligence agents, or “spooks”, as the newspapers are calling them, are never “ex”. However, why the Russians should see fit to make this clear is astonishing to those of us in the know, and merely serves to reinforce my opinion that, sadly, the majority of the population seem to believe that espionage is about as real as an episode of Scooby-Doo.

WHEN JOHN LE CARRÉ published The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in 1963 it was heralded as a novel that brought realism to the spy genre, showing spymasters as rather tedious, ordinary men and women who would be more at home playing with model trains than in hotels playing with supermodels.

THUS THE SCANDAL LEADING up to the inauguration of Mr Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States of America appears merely to be something thrown in by bitter losers in America in order to muddy the waters and leave doubts in the minds of fools as to the true nature of Trump's intentions and desires.

HAPPILY, TO THE RESCUE in this unfortunate affair over Russian spying on the USA, we have the always trusted opinion of Vladimir "Ras" Putin, someone who himself has risen to the highest heights per aspera rather than per Iovem. Christopher Steele, the British "ex" spy who revealed the latest calumny about Trump has produced "an obvious fake", according to Putin, with his foreign minister calling Steele a "swindler".

SWINDLER OR NOT, we know very little about Steele, or even the document mysteriously slipped to Senator John McCain, except that Steele went to Cambridge, was President of the Cambridge Union Debating Society, was recruited by MI6 on leaving university, speaks Russian, and now resides abroad, all of which seem to confirm his untrustworthiness and probable nature as a double agent, or at least a shady character, given his education.

PUTIN FURTHER EXPLAINS that Mr Trump would never have fallen for a honey trap, as he was used to being in the company of beautiful women, having been the organiser of beauty contests for many years. Thus, continues Putin "I can hardly imagine he rushed to the hotel to meet our girls of lower social responsibility (sometimes translated as "loose morals") -- even though they (our prostitutes) are the best in the world, of course."

ONE MUST ADMIRE PUTIN'S PATRIOTISM, as well as the extremely liberal nature of the Russian people and the institutions in which they trust. In my opinion it will be many years before a president of the United States of America will feel confident enough in the open-mindedness of his people to state to the gathered international press that American prostitutes are the best in the world. 

HOWEVER, TRUMP'S SILENCE ON THE MATTER has sparked some discomfort among some of the sex workers (sic) of America, in particular Dennis Huff, owner of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch in the state of Nevada, where prostitution is legal. According to Huff, “Comparing our girls to Russian girls is ridiculous because American prostitutes take pride in their work." In not defending American escort girls, Trump may be reminded of the "Hookers for Hillary" campaign that probably explained his poor result in Nevada.

NEW YEAR RESOLUTION

MY NEW YEAR'S MESSAGE for 2017 is being written in the unlikely location of the Blue Hotel, in Nove Mesto, Bratislava, where I have come to spend a few days experiencing what my younger son calls “proper snow” and my good lady wife calls a “nightmare”, albeit an opportunity to invest in hats and boots.

PRIOR TO BRATISLAVA were several days spent in Austria, including Christmas in a blizzard at the Alpenlounge in Seebruge on the Nordkette Mountain, Innsbruck, and a few days in Vienna, where we were able to compare how Viennese imperial opulence stands up to Parisian republican decadence nowadays.

AS FAR AS BEING IMPRESSIVE goes, Vienna comes out on top every time, with the Julius Meinl gourmet coffee store being perhaps the jewel in the crown of its tasteful demonstration of wealth, and this was our last experience of Vienna before retiring to bed and then coming to Bratislava by train the following day.

THE ENSUING STARK CONTRAST was deliberately engineered in order for us to be able to compare the height of free-capitalist imperialist overkill, shown most famously in the racist tones of the logo of the Julius Meinl store, with the presumed grim poverty of probably the poorest capital city of the old Soviet bloc, vestiges of the influence of which I expected to find here and there.

THE RAILWAY STATION was the first evidence of what I was expecting, showing that you can bring a country in out of the cold, but you can’t bring the cold out of the country. Brutalism and reinforced concrete were still an ever-present on the skyline, competing with absurd mushroomings of blingy building complexes. All in all, however, downtown Bratislava was extremely pleasant, hip and efficient. Hot and cold running water and Dyson dryers everywhere.

THE TV SOUNDTRACK TO THIS SHORT BREAK was the America v Russia affair over Obama’s foolhardy decision to expel thirty-five Russian diplomats whom US intelligence had decided were responsible for cyber hacking and altering the result of the recent US presidential elections, followed by Vladimir Putin’s equally foolish decision to invite all of the children of American diplomats in Moscow to a New Year’s Eve party at the Kremlin. One of them will regret their actions forever, when the Kremlin staff have to smack some precocious brat about the face for “doing a wedgy” or whatever it is that American children find amusing during the ten minutes per day away from their gadgets.

MOST OBSERVERS ARE AWARE of the particular nasty game being played by the spiteful outgoing president, yet I am intrigued by the language used to justify this mass expulsion. These ladies and gentlemen have been accused of, and are being punished for “getting involved in American democracy”.

MY OWN ADVICE HAS ALWAYS BEEN that democracy should be avoided at all costs, so no doubt Obama has a point, but if the Democrats are so keen to revert to Cold War tactics to punish Russia for “getting involved in democracy” then it will be somewhat curious to see how 2017 plays out in the USA. The many people who claim that Donald Trump has no regard for democratic rights will surely be pleased.

KICK OUT THE JAMS

IN THE AGE OF THE SOUNDBITE, politicians over recent years seemed to have clubbed together, somewhat in the same manner as football players, in order to use the same type of language when talking about issue, as if fearful of saying the wrong thing had led them to stick to tried and trusted vocabulary and expressions in their search for linguistic safety.

OF COURSE IN THE CASE of footballers, using "over the moon" and "sick as a parrot", this became something of a cruel joke, when it was patently obvious that subjecting someone who had minutes previously scored the winning goal in a cup final to an interview on television for which he was clearly linguistically unprepared would only result in ridicule.

YET ONE WOULD NATURALLY expect higher things in terms of lexicon from our leaders, many of whom, including politicians on the left of the spectrum, went to our best schools and universities. 

UNFORTUNATELY FOR MANY OF THESE POLITICIANS, going to a "good" school may not be the best preparation for being able to maintain a grip on the reality of the country one is supposed to be governing, and thus being hopelessly out of touch with the so-called 'common man' has paradoxically become more the norm as parliamentary democracy has advanced in the West, resulting, some might say, in the phenomena that have led to triumphs for Trump, Farage and Brexit recently, and to the rise of Le Pen in France and the coming demise of Merkel in Germany next year. 

THE DIFFICULTY APPEARS TO REVOLVE around the curious emotion of empathy. Happily, our politicians in the UK have never stooped to the embarrassingly gooey depths of American politicians, as witnessed by both Clintons on campaign repeatedly stating "I feel your pain" in order to gain votes -- a remarkable strategy coming from two millionaire lawyers when talking to unemployed black families on minimum state benefits, but one which at least worked for Bill.

AND IT IS THE NOTION OF WORK that has inspired this latest missive. In purely linguistic terms, it is difficult for politicians in a country ridden by class discrimination to know how to address what used to be called the "working classes", and naturally it is even harder to be able to relate to them when one knows nothing about how they live, where they work and how much they earn, what they buy with this money, what they wear and eat, where and how they relax and what they want and enjoy.

THUS ENORMOUS GAFFES occasionally appear, such as Gordon Brown's stating that he used to watch "The Eastenders", and promised ever pensioner in Britain an extra 75 pence a week in their pensions. What he imagined one could buy with this money to liven up one's week is anyone's guess, but it clearly showed he had no idea how much a cup of tea and jam roly-poly cost in a local cafe. 

OVER RECENT YEARS OUR SPIN DOCTORS have tried to come up with new terms for the people they would rather never meet but who are essential for an election victory. Having abandoned “the working classes” (and more than just linguistically) they have turned to “hard-working families”, which was replaced shortly afterwards by “hard-working people”, itself ditched before the last election as it was deemed that middle-class office workers felt guiltily insulted.

NOW THERESA MAY’S TEAM has come up with a new term to take the place of the rather unfortunate but self-appointed term “strugglers”. These are those who are in work but finding life difficult; i.e., those for whom the “living wage” (a new expression for the old “working wage” is not even as comfortable as the laughably optimistic “minimum wage”. Thus we have the “Just About Managing” or “The Jams”

WHILE SOME OF THOSE WHO ARE IN TOUCH with popular culture may be reminded of the “pop” group The Jams, and their exciting album What the Fuck is Going On?, others may recall the band The Jam, the most vociferously anti-Thatcher and anti-Conservative musical ensemble since the beginning of rock music. Yet others will no doubt be reminded of the iconic album by Detroit group MC5, Kick out the Jams, no doubt something the Conservatives would be pleased to do given the chance. And no doubt something that will lead to this new term being dropped by the government before any future elections.

(My photo shows our Prime Minister wearing leather trousers from Turkey, for which she is paying 75 pence per week to Littlewood's online catalogue.)

ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK

I WOULD HAVE THOUGHT that by now the pollsters -- those that haven't been fired, that is -- would have come up with more intelligent ways of informing us about the likely results of the elections after their miserable performances predicting the outcome of the UK referendum on Europe and of the general elections in 2015 in the UK, when not one single polling team came up with the right analysis of the future.

IF I WERE A SUSPICIOUS PERSON I might even consider that the pollsters -- in the main liberally-educated graduates from decent upper middle class homes with parents who probably went on protest marches against nuclear bombs in the sixties -- have been more interested in projecting the way people ought to vote in their opinion rather than stating what people are really telling them.

THE MOST OUTRAGEOUS EVENT in this wishful-thinking-about-the-electorate is what happened over the cover of Newsweek magazine, which prepared and shipped out an edition (shown below) "celebrating" (sic) Hillary Clinton's victory. Interviewed by Dermot Murnaghan of Sky News earlier today, Jim Impoco, the editor-in-chief of Newsweek, held up an issue of the magazine live on air and threatened to burn it. Murnaghan wisely advised against this, suggesting a fire hazard, but the fact is that the issue is probably worth a few hundred dollars after newsagents across the USA and the UK received (and sold) it on Wednesday morning.

IMPOCO SENSIBLY ADDED that "this cover just shows that we are stupid." In a gleeful moment of me being allowed to mix up a few metaphors, it might be seen as unhelpful for me to add that the stupidity Impoco correctly admits includes the fact that his publication not only jumped the gun over the results of the presidential election, but also backed the wrong horse.

BUT THEY WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN so stupid had they listened to the only poll that made any sense to me. This was conducted by the company run by the British Lord Ashcroft, who had the good sense to ask people the most important question during the "run up" (sic) to this election, which was "Have you told your close family and friends who you are going to vote for?"

A REMARKABLE FIFTEEN PERCENT of people stated that they had not revealed their choices; this is particularly remarkable in the USA -- not a country in which the population is renowned for its dress sense -- where many people are happy to saunter around in training suits and baseball caps, often with political slogans or the names of sports teams written on them, and have bumper stickers on their enormous vehicles bearing such unnecessary statements as "No to Gun Control" or "Republican and Proud".

THUS AN INTELLIGENT READING OF THIS PERCENTAGE (i.e., one carried out by me) would lead one to believe that at least half of this 15% must be women who are going to vote Trump but are ashamed to tell their mothers/daughters/girl friends etc. As well as probably half of the other 7%, in all making nearly ten percent of the electorate.

NO WORKING CLASS MAN WOULD BE ASHAMED to tell his co-workers in the factory that he was going to vote Trump. And all of the screaming harridans who were going to vote for Secretary Mrs Clinton would have been proud of the fact and probably would have regularly shouted about this to their family and their female friends in the dorm, barrio, hood, leafy suburb or golf course, where they would meet up for discussions about Rousseau, eat burritos or burgers, drink mint juleps or enjoy charity bridge tournaments. 

THEREFORE, IN MY ANALYSIS, TRUMP would win about ten percent more of the electorate than the polls showed. Almost exactly what happened, and indeed what I saw on the TV screen when I woke up at seven on Wednesday morning; almost exactly what happened when I stayed up all night to watch the result of the UK referendum, and almost exactly what happened in the last general election in Britain. Unfortunately, living outside of the UK, I cannot bet money on the results. The odds were appealing.

COME ROMANIANS, COME

IF NOTHING ELSE, MY YEARS AT UNIVERSITY taught me to avoid politics and politicians like the plague. My father, in his infinite wisdom, had already primed me on many occasions about those people in life who were, in his (perfectly correct) opinion, "odd".

HE PERSUADED ME NOT TO JOIN the Scouts when he quietly sowed the seeds of doubt in my mind about scoutmasters with his gentle question, "David, do you think it is normal for a grown man to give up his weekends to go about wearing short trousers and camping with ten-year-old boys when he could be at home spending time with his wife?"

WHEN I TURNED EIGHTEEN he gave me his opinion about voting: "Just think, before you vote, 'Why would anyone want me to vote for them?'" To this day I have not come up with a sensible answer to this question other than that these people want my money and power over me without having to work in a proper job. Thus I have never voted in any capacity in my life.

AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON the main candidates for elections seemed to be foaming-at-the-mouth socialists who were deranged enough to believe that being chosen for a committee that basically was only responsible for selecting what music to play at the Friday night disco was one step towards smashing the major banking institutions, eliminating religion, ending poverty in the third world and forming world governments made up almost exclusively of black homosexual invalids.

AT KINGS COLLEGE LONDON the candidates at the hustings were usually decent, middle-class people who seemed genuine enough, but when I got to know some of them better I found that one, in my first year, still collected Action Man equipment at the age of 19, another had a passion for watching weather maps on TV and another collected Thomas the Tank Engine toys. Heaven knows what other perversions were waiting to appear in their future lives.

AT MAGDALEN COLLEGE OXFORD things were more straightforward. One chap, when I asked him why I should vote for him for a position on the Student Union Board had a refreshingly honest reply. "If you vote for me," he pointed out, "you will feel you are a part of a democratic process. If no one votes for me I shall simply tell my father to put me on the Board." This gentleman is currently a member of the House of Lords.

ALL IN ALL, MOST OF THESE people were odd. Which brings me to Keith "Vazeline" Vaz. Of course it is not "odd" for politicians to keep money given to them to give to charities. Of course it is not "odd" for married politicians with children to pay to have sex with young male prostitutes. Of course it is not odd for these politicians to openly text these prostitutes about how much "rogering" they will give them and how horny they are feeling. Of course it is not odd for politicians to defend one thing in public and do something else in private. Such as purchasing and supplying illegal drugs. Of course not.

HOWEVER, WHAT IS EXTREMELY ODD is for a politician to be so utterly stupid as Mr Vaz is. He has already barely managed to wriggle his way out of a series of scandals involving bribes, financial misdemeanour and selling of influence, and -- error of all errors -- has been critical of press freedom. Oddness is embodied in the fact that an experienced politician like Mr Vaz should believe that he could get away with all this behaviour without the press wanting to take an interest. 

EVERYONE LIKES A GOOD STORY, and Mr Vaz recently left, as they sometimes say, the book open on the dining room table, when he made the mistake of telling his Polish rent boys that he was interested in having sex with a Romanian lad. Vaz, in the texts he wrote and which were published by the Daily Mirror today, seemed particularly excited about the fact that the (non-existent) Romanian boy was "intact" and possibly didn't speak English but was ready for a bit of "rough" in return for drugs and money.

THIS ASPECT OF THE EVENT played into the hands of the press and into mine. For it was Mr Vaz who, on the morning of January 1st 2014, the first day that Romanians could come to the UK legally, went to Luton airport to personally meet the first Romanians off the plane from Tirgu Mures and to welcome them to "our country". I watched the press conference live at the time. "We want Romanians to come," said Mr Vaz. "They will be a valuable contribution to us all." Indeed.

(My pictures show a somewhat shifty Mr Vaz, at Luton Airport at 7.30 in the morning meeting the first Romanian off the plane, then a friend of his, and then buying them breakfast.)

WHAT LIES BENEATH

I MUST CONFESS I AM MILDLY AMUSED by the advice given by the British Government security services at MI6 before the visit of Prime Minister Theresa May and her officials to Hangzhou in China for the G20 summit meeting.

IT SHOULD NOT BE NECESSARY to warn today's politicians about the dangers of spying, and particularly of "honey trapping" when powerful diplomats and top-notch businessmen are gathered for talks in countries where the local populations are desperate to escape the regimes under which they live, and where a few hundred pounds, which any gentleman would have in his wallet for minor expenses between meals, would allow a local to live like royalty for a few years.

THE DISASTROUS VISIT TO CHINA by Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2008 involved one of his close advisors being "spiked", "honeyed" and "fleeced", to use the jargon known to us who have worked for the security services, an incident which disgraced the whole mission, and particularly the government security team.

WHEN, AS A YOUNG MAN, I was involved in work for the British Government security services, we were always told to undress under the bed sheets so as not to be photographed by hidden cameras when staying in hotels. Although I was not "in field" in China, but in Portugal, I was still advised to carry a bed sheet with me to any public toilet and cover myself in it completely when using the sit-down lavatory.

I SHOULD STATE THAT IN PORTUGAL in the late nineteen-seventies this was also useful as a protection against mosquitoes, and that I grew to look forward to those moments of complete isolation from reality.

AS FOR UNDRESSING UNDER THE SHEETS, I may also state that there were some positives to this practice other than avoiding being photographed by cameras hidden in the air conditioning unit, radio alarm clock, wall-bracketed TV set or the more obvious smoke detector. I used to take a good deal of erotic pleasure in taking my clothes off in this manner, particularly when in the company of a beautiful young girl, an inept "spy" with no talent whatsoever for dissimulation and who was doing the same thing next to me.

THE OFFICIAL ADVICE TO THERESA MAY and her team is to "undress under the bedclothes" if one is "uncomfortable about being seen naked". I saw a photograph of the British G20 team earlier today, and either there are a lot of deluded people (albeit true that most politicians are deluded about their own worth and value) on this diplomatic mission, or there will be a lot of people undressing under the sheets.

NO PRIME MINISTER OF THE UK has ever been what one might call "my cup of tea", and if I were in close proximity with the present one I would be more than pleased to have her undress under the sheets, hopefully after having removed her kitten heels and left her corset in the bathroom beforehand. Someone should advise two members of her team that major blackmail may ensue if anyone gets a photo of their false teeth in a cup of water by the bed or of their hairpieces hanging on the bedstead.

GORDON BROWN'S DIPLOMAT was "fleeced", but at least this was after he had had the aplomb to take a seventeen-year-old prostitute to his hotel room; getting "fleeced" because someone has a photo of you bald and toothless when you portray yourself as dynamic and a possible candidate for the highest office is something a little smuttier.

EURODISNEYLAND

THE SOI-DISANT EUROPEAN COMMISSION was already a bunch of fools and madmen when it was headed by the absurd fascist clown José Manuel Barroso, with his arrogant ideas about saving the planet by banning 100 watt light bulbs and giving every washing machine and fridge an "eco" rating certificate which we now know was all a pack of lies.

BARROSO'S "CULTURAL PROJECT" for Europe was supposed to end up with us all being a sort of European version of the United States. However, although I know that Barroso is a limited person on the intellectual level, I find it difficult to believe that anyone with a smattering of intelligence could imagine that a literally fantastic system like this could work, with honest, hard-working clean Lutherans living on the same level as toothless ruffians who spend most waking hours lounging around semi-naked in cemented gardens outside houses without proper furniture inside.

WE REGULARLY HEAR ABOUT THE EU being "the world's biggest market" and how Britain will miss out on the possibility of trade. Yet of the 300 million people in the Union only about 40 million are prepared or able to spend cash on goods; the Puritans in the north, in Holland, Denmark, Sweden and northern Germany are generally afraid of being ostentatious with their money as they think they will go to Hell if they do.

THE EASTERN EUROPEANS, when they don't bury their money in the garden or put it in plastic bags and sink it into the well in the yard, waste it on building houses that they never finish; the Spanish, Italians, Greeks and Portuguese are perfectly happy to be ostentatious, and thus we have people who do not have enough money to change their underwear on a regular basis putting down deposits on expensive cars and houses which will be repossessed after a few months.

SO MUCH FOR THE MARKET over the last ten years. But Jean-Claude Juncker has taken this cultural megalomania to new heights in publishing a medal table which shows that the "nation" which won most medals at the Olympics was in fact the European Union.

OF COURSE THIS WOULD be perfectly legitimate if there were such a thing as a European Union team -- which the Eurocrats probably have wet dreams about -- but there isn't. How Juncker believes he can make a medal table grouping together nations which actually competed against each other at the games is beyond me. But so is so much about the fantasy land that is the European Union.